At the Fortune Brainstorm:Tech conference in Pasadena, Calif., on July 22, 2009, Marc Andreessen said on stage: "One of the defining experiences of my career was spending 9 months as an intern at IBM in 1990-91." The number of layers of management between him and the CEO was 17, "from which I concluded that it was unlikely I would make a career at IBM. … It was essentially like working for the Soviet Union at the time." He had a great experience at IBM, but that serves as his internal reference for big companies. In this three-minute segment, recorded with a Flip Ultra HD recorder, he compares the culture of small and large companies and concludes, "Startups are where a lot of innovation happens. … But you have to get big to have a big impact. I've always thought an entrepreneur needs to think in terms of getting to a large size in scale in order to have a big impact." Less